feed your head
Advice for Refining & Improving the News & Information Diet of a Nonprofit Leader
Yes, I’m quoting Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. No I’m not talking about psychedelic drugs, as she was. My topic is your news & information diet. You need to be a well-read, well-informed person. We all do, but if you have a leadership position in a nonprofit, you do more than most. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, since the pandemic abruptly changed my own reading diet for a while. Some tips:
1. News is repetitive. It’s easy to waste time reading or hearing the same story three times or 40 times. Try to engineer your news experiences to minimize that. Don’t be a newshound. You don’t have time for that. Find a healthier hobby.
2. Reading is more time-efficient than TV or video. The amount of information you gain from 15 minutes of reading is way greater than the amount of information you gain from 15 minutes of watching video. Sure there are a few, key video clips you need to see, but not many.
3. Know how to sort facts from opinions from speculation. What you want is facts. Look at your present news & information flow, and consider how the statements you read or listen to sort out along those lines. “Somebody said x” = fact. “That’s divisive!” = opinion. “This will cause deeper division in Congress” = speculation. Look for news & information sources that deliver a lot of facts, and a lot of unique facts, that don’t appear everywhere else.
4. There’s tons of free stuff out there, but you probably have to pay for the most fact-packed sources. Opinions and speculation are easy. To find, gather, and analyze facts, professionally, costs money. That’s why you have to pay for the New York Times, or the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal, or professional journals like the Stanford Social Innovation Review (just to name one). Those are packed with facts.
5. There really is such a thing as expertise. Seek it out. Learn from it.
6. Your news & information diet needs to be dynamic, changing often. That’s the world we live in. Persistently evaluate your present flow of inputs. What should be dropped? Persistently add new flows, try them out, see if they deliver for you.
7. If your job changes, your news & information diet should change. So also if your organization changes, or you move to a new place. The diet should change over the course of your life.
8. Know your topics. For your position as a citizen, but especially for your position in nonprofit work, what topics do you need to stay up on? What topics are you spending time on unnecessarily?
9. This takes time. You need reading time in your day, in your week, in your year. A lot of it. There are shortcuts, but this basic truth holds.
10. Go deep on something. Build expertise. If your work is in racial justice, read deeply and widely on racial justice. Or, from time to time, maybe for a speaking or writing assignment, go deep on something for a limited time.
11. Sources lead to sources. Good reading leads to good reading. A good book will mention other good books, in the text, notes, or bibliography. A good article or website will point you to others. Work out your reading diet so that you go back over things you’ve read, and find new, good things to add to your diet.
12. One final tip: when you put something in your diet and find it helpful or even essential, stick with it. Like Jaffarian’s Mission Research Ezine (maybe? hopefully?)
love, joy, peace … Michael
emichaeljaffarian@gmail.com. Michael is a freelance consultant to nonprofits, with an emphasis on research. Contact him for a free, one-hour consultation.
Vol. 1 No. 1
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